The notification system in iOS sucks. Especially on the iPhone. That's no secret, but it bears repeating because it's gone unchanged since the first iPhone was introduced in 2007. Hopefully this is the last time it'll warrant complaining about.

Popups were an understandable workaround for the shortcomings of the iPhone operating system. But…
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Here's why the existing notifications are no good. If you get a text, or an alert from any app carrying permissions to blast your screen, it completely interrupts whatever else you're doing. A sizable rectangular box pops up in the middle of the screen, and doesn't go away until you address it. Furthermore, if you get notifications from multiple apps, there's no way to tell until you clear one notification away and have another immediately pop up. And when it comes to high traffic apps like email (which would be foolish to enable popups for), it's impossible to tell who's sending you things with the more subtle badge alert on the app icon. Again, utter trash.

There have been rumors for awhile now that the iOS notification system was in the process of being revamped. And with WWDC on the horizon, many sources have said this new system will be introduced with iOS 5. Apple's behind the scenes move seem to support this idea.

I've ranted and raved about how much the iOS notification system annoys me in the past, so…
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If you missed today's news Apple hired Peter Hajas, a jailbreak developer who gained attention for his MobileNotifier iOS utility, which provided a slick notifications overlay for iOS. According to MobileCrunch, he's currently in a trial period, but his extensive (and current) work on MobileNotifier seems to indicate that he's being brought in to work on iOS's notification system.

But a year ago, Apple made another, more important hire. They got their hands on Rich Dellinger, the man responsible for the notifications system in WebOS. If you've ever used WebOS, you'd probably agree that they have the best smartphone notifications system, hands down. It's powerful, flexible, and most importantly, stays the hell out of your way when you're using a WebOS device.